What to do when your enjoyment of a book forces you to confront a genre bias:

1. Quietly place the book on a shelf in your classroom library, work on plausible deniability.

“Emergency Contact? Not sure how that got there—maybe the publisher sent it to me?”

2. Declare the book a genre outlier, anomalous, and praise it with “Yes, but . . .”

“Yes, I enjoyed Emergency Contact, but mostly because the author breaks with narrative convention by using lists and replications of text messages, and her usage of pop-cultural references and neologisms like “snack-crastinated” creates a ludic narrative voice . . .”

3. Admit how you tore through the book because you loved the two main characters and dug how the author unironically/ironically embraced many genre conventions—and finally admit to yourself and others that enjoying a good romantic story neither makes you a Disney-fied cultural dupe nor destroys the last vestiges of your illusory masculine street cred.

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi will make you put down your phone long enough to see what happens between first-year University of Texas student Penny and slightly older barista/baker/brooding budding filmmaker Sam, the supposedly off limits and unobtainable “uncle” (it’s complicated) of Penny’s UT roommate, Jude.

And then pick your phone up and tell all your friends to read this book. Even if, like Penny, you’ve never had many friends.

Blisteringly funny, alternately snarky and heartfelt, a winning mixture of the engagingly trivial and the disturbingly real, Emergency Contact illuminates as much as it captivates, shining lights of varying intensities on issues such as female friendships, mother-daughter relationships, modern romance, sexual assault, race and class in America, and the ways social media and technology are changing how we construct our identities and connect with each other. Highly recommended.

Tom Breihan over at Stereogum has been running a column about all the Number One songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart since its inception in 1958. (It’s great—you should check it out.) I decided to use each song as a writing prompt.

A bench of slatted wood sitting under the kitchen window where the driveway meets the side door of my house, a bench pressed enough by weather to regress to the color of “not.”

I inherited these items when I became a homeowner eleven years ago.

The stove sputtered to a stop earlier this month; apparently the aging igniter no longer ignites (must. avoid. easy. metaphor. here.), and an ignition remix will cost more than the stove is worth. A replacement arrives next week.

The dishwasher still works—sort of. Sometimes it leaks a bit, as all systems do, though more noticeably than grammar. Sometimes the drain fails to provide proof of concept. “Clean” has itself become a shifting continuum; meanwhile, I fear the neighbors hear the dishwasher operate—this is not a subtle beast. A replacement arrives next week.

The bench remains, but with a personally chosen and applied fresh coat of paint—”Rookwood Dark Red.”

Repainting a bench may merit scant mention for most, but for craft-addled me, this is an alpha move. An alpha move with beta moments to be sure, most notably the sheen of terror at the Bazooka Joe color on initial application. Trust the reasoning —let the paint dry, bubblegum becomes burgundy. A bench renewed, ready to weather further seasons.

Sometimes what worked in the past needs replacing. Sometimes what worked in past needs refreshing. Sometimes we need to be patient with the process.

Tom Breihan over at Stereogum has been running a column about all the Number One songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart since its inception in 1958. (It’s great—you should check it out.) I decided to use each song as a writing prompt.

Tom Breihan over at Stereogum has been running a column about all the Number One songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart since its inception in 1958. (It’s great—you should check it out.) I decided to use each song as a writing prompt.

Tom Breihan over at Stereogum has been running a column about all the Number One songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart since its inception in 1958. (It’s great—you should check it out.) I decided to use each song as a writing prompt.

Tom Breihan over at Stereogum has been running a column about all the Number One songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart since its inception in 1958. (It’s great—you should check it out.) I decided to use each song as a personal writing prompt.

Tom Breihan over at Stereogum has been running a column about all the Number One songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart since its inception in 1958. (It’s great—you should check it out.) I decided to use each song as a writing prompt for myself.

The last two years have taught us what we could not forget: that animals taste a lot like people.

And that’s how you hook a reader on the second page.

A twisty love story about identity and what makes us human, an explosive techno-thriller about playing God with genetic code, a dystopian survival story—This Mortal Coil is all of these things, and not once did I feel like shuffling off from its four hundred plus pages. (Kudos to Suvada for acknowledging the Monty Python connection in the title with a seemingly tossed off line late in the novel.)

Much like Elliot in Mr. Robot, Catarina Agatta is a young hacker with extraordinary talents and major father issues. The evil corporation here is Cartaxus, and when we meet Catarina, she is struggling to survive in the wilderness: survive her hunger, survive her isolation, survive the Wrath caused by the Hydra Virus that has led most survivors to flee to the supposed safety of the Cartaxus bunkers. But these bunkers are not for Catarina—her brilliant geneticist father, Dr. Lachlan Agatta, ordered her to stay in the wild when he and his assistant (and Catarina’s romantic interest) Dax were forcibly taken by Cartaxus operatives.

Two years later, and Catarina’s fragile existence in the resistance is threatened by the arrival at her cabin of Cartaxus soldier Cole. However, Cole, like nearly every character in Suvada’s engaging novel, is more complicated than he seems at first glance. He and Catarina join forces in a race to build a vaccine before the virus mutates further. This race for a cure leads Catarina to learn more about her own identity and the role her father has played in shaping this world.

Breathless in the best ways, This Mortal Coil pauses to provide nuanced discussion of the ethics of altering our fundamental genetic identities—and does so without every seeming preachy or pedantic. My students and I eagerly await book two, This Cruel Design, which is to be released this fall.

In the America of Lean on Pete, you’re either rooted or rootless, bound or footloose, but hounded always by the past. You live in the shadows, even when you live in the exposed skeleton of the desert. Hidden from view—children invisible to their parents, women invisible to the men who use them, drunk and disappointed dreamers invisible to the wider world. Or worse: those no longer dreaming, just damned.

This is the world of Charley Thompson, fifteen years old and living in a Portland shack with a sometimes father and a constant hunger. Running the streets (literally) to pursue his dream of playing football for his new high school when the school year starts, Charley is driven into the sadness of Del Montgomery, a hobbled horse trainer and trader. Working for Del provides Charley with some money, a further education into the corrupt soul of the American Dream, and a quiet friendship with a horse named Lean on Pete.

Circumstances drive Charley deeper into Del’s world, until Pete is too worn down for Del to lean on any longer. Choosing rootless over rooted in cruelty, Lean on Pete becomes travels with Charley (and Pete), a great escape across the northern passage of the American West. Though he feels damned at times, Charley still dreams, dreams of reuniting in Wyoming with the only family member he knows, his aunt.

With a parsimony befitting both the physical and emotional geography, Vlautin gives us a coming of age survival story in an America many of us willingly shutter, a novel illuminating the harrowing strain involved in chipping away at American rust.

I admit it took the positive buzz around the film version to bring this quietly devastating novel to the top of my to-be-read pile, but the subtle redemption of Lean on Pete should be read immediately.